With Gamebryo + Umbra, yes indeed.

I don't think the size of cities is an issue when it comes to being to large. With heavy optimization and some basic scripting, you could create cities filled to the brim with NPCs. The only issue with large cities is Bethesda work ethic. If cities ever got big enough to be an issue, you could either use a spell, or implement a incity fast travel system.

i think that instead of making bigger towns that are ugly they should focus on making towns that blow your mind away. towns on the edge of a cliff that have beautiful views, small towns in icy wastes with lively bars filled with colorful characters, towns that have a roarin campfire with wisened old cooks telling about there days in the legion...sigh

I don't remember any other adventurers who would actually change towns as the game went on, and do things that normal adventurers would do.

And as far as your 'few people should be traveling due to the crisis' excuse, that's a pretty big stretch as the majority of people had no reaction to Oblivion gates popping up all over the place. I doubt that thought process even crossed the minds of the devs as a reason to not have more realistic NPCs.


Morrowind's cities are still puny, but they felt better constructed and thought out than Oblivion's. The Imperial City felt very cramped to me, certainly not what I wanted out of the capital city of the empire.

The AI had better be improved a lot, as the over-hyped AI in Oblivion failed to live up to the majority of what it was advertised as, it's pretty well documented. It did very little to benefit the cities, or the entire game in general, IMO. It's cool in concept, but what they packaged with the game was neutered to the point of flat out lies with what was previously promised in pre-release previews.


Daggerfall's cities were the most realistic out of any of them, IMO. Hundreds of people doing their own thing, even if it is just wandering around aimlessly, it gave the illusion that the city could support itself. They go inside at night and the cities gate's close.

Graphics don't make a city feel/not feel dead. I'm honestly not sure how a technical limitation of Daggerfall concerning graphics and sound is being used against it in a debate about city size. Daggerfall kills Morrowind and Obvlivion in scope and all things dealing with cities and towns.

Graphics affect immersion. The NPCs didn't look like people. Daggerfall feels like a dead and creepy game. The people weren't people, they were rotating 2D text boxes. Daggerfall's cities didn't feel like cities, but they did feel like generic, empty wastelands. Graphics and sounds can be bad enough to make a town feel dead. The people in Daggerfall didn't appear to be or sound like people. They didn't give the illusion of being alive. The game felt like a lonely, boring wasteland that didn't feel real. I missed Oblivion and it's comfortable, safe cities while playing Daggerfall. The people looked and acted like people instead of 2D zombies. Even Hackdirt felt safer than Daggerfall's generic, repetitive, and empty cities. Oblivion feels like a living, breathing world. Daggerfall feels like a bleak pop-up picture book. Morrowind's cities feel comfortable, like Oblivion's, but I still like Oblivion's cities more. Daggerfall's cities were big, but empty and creepy. Also, big cities are usually cramped and are not usually well though-out. Daggerfall's cities weren't planned at all, though. They weren't interesting. The entire game was big, but empty. Oblivion's NPCs do more than NPCs in Daggerfall and Morrowind, and there are people in Oblivion who travel a bit.

Daggerfall may have been massive in scope, but it was really just a jumble of a lotta nothing. And Oblivion felt like there just wasnt much there at all. Morrowind seemed to have the perfect balance.

200+ posts so time to lock this.